wonderful stuff! I love your sketches of live people the most, mine were never that good looking. I like your studies of other paintings, but I also feel if you are going to study another painting the aim is to understand their process more than anything.

For example, alot of reinassance paintings - even if they appear really colorful - were only made using three colors plus white and black. I don't know what your process is, I can only guess by what I am seeing! My 'guess' is you are not creating the painting using the same colors as the old masters.

Even if your medium is digital, you can still recreate the process of these old masters. I think you will get more out of your studies that way!

Nice stuff, keep doing life studies.
I think you're going a little crazy with the colors, especially in your digital work, try working with smaller nuances and see how that works. Kitty's suggestion is a good idea, try thinking of it more like a traditional media and use less colors.

The reference from the sculpture you did is awesome! I agree with the advice your getting! Most important is to just keep going...your using an excellent full range of values in your paintings but details are remaining too sketchy.

My cheesy cheesy trick is to start with tiny thumnails to nail down composition and start enlarging and detailing sometimes 3 or 4 times till the resolution is 800x600 or so. Its actually a very fast way to work digitally, and it soaks up details where you want in the points of interest.

the hand looks good.
and the master study, before you paint it, make sure you got the sketch right, so you have all the proportions right. then you can concenrate on colour only, and dont have to bother about proportions.

hey! they arent called the old masters for no reason! its a real challenge you cant get over night =3 your study is still great though! I like your new color pallette and I think it was a good choice for the painting you were studying from. the drawing is so close to the original as well

I love drawing creatures. . but I had a slight problem with that challenge, mostly that the creature had to be all blue! but if you do another creature challenge again, really imagine this being a living creature. could your creature possibly glide with those transparent flaps? and since your creature is living on snowy mountians, would it need a thicker coat of fur? what purpose would the fins have, and so on.

otherwise I like the quickly loose style you did for the mountains, although for the creature thread, you dont necessarily need a background do you? =D

suhsealyuh The master study is nothing to get frustrated over. Overall the piece has a lot consistencies w/ Davinci's piece. I think if you took the 2 images, his and yours and put them side by side on the same file. Scaled them both to pretty close the same size and then started pulling some of your ruler grid lines down into the image. This might help you make your proportional changes faster. Art will never be easy! That's why we like it!!!

In all honesty keep up that study theres no reason to stop, just go in with a finer brush and fix things up. Also if your having touble maybe go back to basics? Perhaps do studies in Black and White, so you can focus on proportion and tone.

Nice stuff, I especially like the hand even though the knuckles seems to show to much for that angle. Earlier I wasn't so much referring to the number of colors as the strength of the colors. You tend to use very strong and contrasting colors, try working more with subtle nuances and use more subtle colors, right now they're all over the scale.

I'm really digging the hand holding the wine glass. the color and lighting is looking really nice with the highlights on the glass and the shades in the wine underneath. the line drawing looks more life like as far as lines go. so be carful to not loose those importnat lines and shapes when moving form line art to coloring. looking good.

I like it. It intersts me, however don't forget diegesis... your telling us about this creature, at the moment we can count maybe 2-3 major things from your concept. What im saying is I want to know more about this creature. The soultion may be to draw many thumbs and explore what the cow - heart haverster actually is, then pick out the defining features.

I think you have a really strong drawing basis. I really like your life drawings, because you have a good sense of the figure. One of my instructors once told me that I'm much better at drawing than painting because I've been drawing for much longer. So when I'm painting, I should start with a good drawing, and as a result my painting will be stronger because it plays off my strength.

I think the same thing may apply to you as well, so perhaps you can try starting with a really solid drawing first, and then painting on top of it. This may also help with your mushy edges, because your line drawing will help you define where edges are. Then you will know better where to sharpen the shadows. Don't be afraid to be really harsh with value transitions! Sometimes it also helps, if you use photoshop, to do all your darks and lights as selections at first. Grab that polygon or free selection tool and block in the light and dark areas. Then you can blend the edges together to soften the effect.

Another good idea is to always work in 300 dpi, and zooooom right in around the value transitions to get them nice and sharp.

Here, I did a quick tutorial about what I was talking about just because. It's kind of bad. Sorry But it illustrates what I meant. And you can totally see how I'm worse at painting than drawing -___-;; Nonetheless, I hope it helps. This is only one of many ways to help you get sharper edges though, and of course this is just advice.

Hey, that cloth scultpture is relly cool and a really good reference to practice color and tone. I wish I had one hehe.

I think your heart harvester design is looking more like concept art now! excellent work. Now chuck a perspective grid in thier and make the creature in blocks (like I kinda did in my latest work) then put in the curved surfaces (remeber the corners of the box act like a center line in 2 pont perspective so position the center of the sphere on them). The box method also helps for lighting (just sade one side of the box) - anyway give it a go.

Id also like to see 10-20 tiny thumbnails of possible backgrounds for the heart harvester, just remeber to base them on at least a one point grid so we have a sense of depth.

cool stuff, one thing i would suggest is to do more studies, nothing fancy just quick sketches whenever you have a few minutes to spare. It will improve your understanding of muscles, anatomy, and features.

I really like the cartoony eagle lines, but I think youve lost something in the colored versions. lines are just as much apart of a character as are its colors. pay extra attention to the shapes your original line version creates, and compare it to the shapes your colored ones make. Compare the one with the glasses, do you see how different their faces are?

the lined one has more character becuase the feathers are more ruffled, the beak is crooked and becuase of the eyebrow lines. before to keep these features in the colored version and it should feel much stronger!